


.10 Only Time Will Tell

by LaPilar



Series: Star Wars Imagines/One-Shots [9]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Badass!Reader, Fighting, Gen, and mando, babysitter!Reader, clone wars adjacent, combine clones, garbo - freeform, just the slightest hint at attraction, lol not sure what to tag, mysterious!Reader, two of my faves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-08
Updated: 2020-05-08
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:35:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24068221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaPilar/pseuds/LaPilar
Summary: Mando hasn't been entirely honest with you. It's only fair for you to be withholding with him.
Relationships: The Mandalorian (The Mandalorian TV) & Reader, The Mandalorian (The Mandalorian TV) & You
Series: Star Wars Imagines/One-Shots [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1255886
Kudos: 26





	.10 Only Time Will Tell

“No, hold it like this.” He took the knife from my hand and flipped it the other way around in his.

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes, instead taking the knife back and following his terrible advice.

When Mando had suggested he teach me some self-defense after a close call during one of his hunts, it was clear that he wasn’t making a suggestion.

To be fair, I was lying about it having been a close call. He’d returned, quarry in tow, to find the body of a petty thief dumped unceremoniously outside the Razor Crest.

I told him the guy had snuck aboard when I was careless enough to leave the door open, and it was sheer luck that ended with him dead and not me. ‘I managed to get out a blaster in time,’ I’d said, shrugging.

Really? He’d attacked me when I was walking around the nearby forest with the child. I’d put him on the ground in about two seconds, unperturbed by both his small knife and his petty insults.

There was blood on my shirt, so I dragged the body back to the ship as an explanation, just tweaking the story a bit. I’ll admit, part of me wanted to see what the enigmatic Mandalorian would do.

He’d accepted the story, and we’d moved on. Or so I thought.

I imagined this must be what it’s like to have a PhD in a subject and be stuck in a youngling class covering the basics of it. I was way out of this league.

He feigned again, and I stabbed downward with the knife he’d given me, trying to make my movements look clunky. Which wasn’t too hard, holding a knife like this.

He wanted me to use a reverse grip, the blade pointing down to the ground between our feet. It was what he used, and most people his size. Perfect for downward stabbing.

Problem was, I was more than half a foot shorter than him. If I was doing any stabbing, it would be upwards. Which is why I’d trained with the hammer grip for the most part.

I wasn’t paying close attention, and the knife skittered off the beskar on his shoulder. He took a step back instantly, giving me a long look that was almost definitely disapproval.

I gave an apologetic smile. “Sorry, I guess I just need more practice.”

“Get out of your head. What’re you thinking about?”

‘How stupid this is,’ I thought, again keeping my eyes from rolling. “Oh, you know.” I waved my hand dismissively in the air. “Things.”

More disapproval exuding from him. 

I was starting to get mad, even if he was totally in the right. He’d hired me to protect and watch the child when he couldn’t; he had genuine reason to worry over my ability to protect others and myself. 

It might be easier to just prove to him I know what I’m doing, but along with that would come difficult questions to answer. 

Mando didn’t know my past. And I didn’t know his. It was a good arrangement; one I didn’t want to risk. 

Without warning, he shoved two hands out, hard. They caught me on the shoulders with no time to respond, and I fell to my ass on the ground. 

Instinctually, I gave him my trademarked, ‘How dare you!’ glare.

My second instinct was to kick him in the balls, but I didn’t think he’d appreciate that. Then there were some (probably fair) doubts that I’d be able to get my foot that high before he responded. I also couldn’t imagine my leather boots doing much against his beskar codpiece. 

Earlier, I’d pointed out the inherent power difference, with him in his full beskar’gam and me in my plainclothes. He’d said that I might need to fight people like him someday. I forced myself to chalk up the unsettling response to that mysterious façade he maintained.

He offered a hand to help me up. I disregarded it, glare firmly locked on my face as I shoved myself up off the ground.

I should be happy that my secrecy and acting was working.

Mando wasn’t dumb. Not when it came to anything, but especially not when it came to people. He’d recognized years ago that an unreadable expression and painful silence would make most people fill it. He could sit still and silent in front of someone and have them spilling their life story to him in 30 seconds.

It was part of what made him such a good bounty hunter. It also made him really uncomfortable when I came to work for him and answered his stony silences with the same. 

When we’d been working together for two weeks, all he knew was my first name. More than I knew about him, to be sure. But he was used to knowing things about people, and I could tell it was throwing him off to know so little about me.

So I’d begun the acting. Gradually at first, pretending to be the shy little woman who finally comes out of her shell with someone she’s been around a lot. And I played her ditzy. Not obnoxiously so, just enough to keep him from asking unnecessary questions for fear I’d respond with a ten-minute load of Bantha fodder.

I never lied to him, but I didn’t tell him much of the truth. It was a complicated balancing act, juggling my persona as simultaneously competent, loquacious, dull, and adaptive. 

I did it spectacularly. He’d grown, if anything, less questioning of my past over the past few weeks. I did my job, cleaning and watching the little one, and he did his. And we lived in a comfortable, if quiet, sense of harmony.

One thing I hadn’t considered was my own pride. I’d played dumb before, and it hadn’t bothered me this much. But he was the only being I was around for most of the day (the only being that could talk, anyway). He gave off such intensely menacing vibes that I wanted to match them- I wanted to impress him. 

This little role I was playing was doing no such thing. 

“Well, if you could get ‘things’ off your mind, that’d be great.” I could hear the sick sarcasm even through his voice modulator. “You’re not doing much to convince me you’re a good fit for this job.”

Kriff. The metronome had dipped too far into ditz territory. I scrambled to recover.

“I’ll work on it, I swear. I need this job.” That, at least, was the truth.

“Only time will tell.” With that cryptic line, the lesson was over. He walked back to the ship, cape sweeping dramatically behind him.

I was left sitting there with the knife in my hand. It was beskar, the only knife made of the precious metal that he owned. The handle was simple, a cheaper metal wrapped in a leather strand for grip. 

As I examined it, I noticed the beginning of an inscription, just barely visible near the finger guard. I peeked up at the cockpit, but Mando wasn’t visible. He was probably checking on the child.

It was nosy, but he never let me look too hard at his weapons. Not that I’d ever asked before, I guess. I undid the leather carefully, pressing myself back into the dim shade of a nearby tree. 

The inscription was in Mando’a, no surprise there. ‘Ib'tuur jatne tuur ash'ad kyr'amur,’ it read. I’d learned a bit of the language in my time with him, but not enough. I couldn’t translate a word of that.

Mando called for me to come on from the ship, and I hastily rewrapped the knife before heading over. I slapped it into his palm, and we were on our way to the next bounty. 

The time passed in hyperspace was tense, more tense than usual. I could tell he wasn’t happy with me, and I was clueless as to how to remedy it instantaneously. He’d just have to give me more lessons until he was satisfied.

I let out an internal groan at the thought of more lessons, but if I had to do it I would.

It was better than either of the alternatives, anyway.

The next tracking fob led us to some backwater, rural planet, and Mando disappeared after giving me the simple instructions, “Watch the ship.”

“That’s it; three words and he steals off into the night to go catch the bad guys,” I muttered to myself as I entertained the little guy. It wasn’t hard; he liked one of the small metal knobs from the control panel upstairs, and tugging on my long hair. I’d seen the Force-sensitive thing once, shocked white as a sheet until Mando had explained things. That was rare though. 

The twin suns were steadily setting, and Mando had been gone for a few hours now. Most likely he wouldn’t be back until tomorrow morning.

I let out an involuntary yawn, apparently tired from my overthinking. It certainly wasn’t from the meager training session earlier. 

The baby mirrored me, and I found myself wishing Mando would name him something other than, ‘The child.’ That wasn’t a real name, and this guy had so much charm he deserved one of his own. 

“You sleepy, baby boy?” I murmured, picking him up from the sleeping platform where he’d been playing. “Me too.”

We headed up to the cockpit. He nestled comfortably into my arms, big eyes heavy with exhaustion. I rocked him back and forth, singing whatever songs came to mind in a low tone. The lyrics didn’t matter, as long as he could hear my warm chest moving in and out next to him. 

The one pain in the ass with this little guy was that he absolutely refused to go to sleep unless it was in one of our arms. To my disappointment (that I was strongly in denial about), he still preferred Mando, even with all the beskar’gam.

To date, greenie was the first child that’d made me temporarily regret getting the operation to make it impossible for me to have one of my own. It’d been a necessary evil in my line of work, but cradling him against my chest made those maternal instincts soar again. I shoved them back down.

I was glad to see him fall asleep quickly (thirty minutes was pretty good for him), and gently laid him down into the crib before shutting the cover. It locked upon closing, and Mando and I were the only ones who had access. Other than greenie, who’d discovered two days into his residence that he could open it from the inside.

Two minutes of true silence reassured me that all was well with the little creature, and I descended the ladder. I selected a blaster from the armory before dropping the hatch. 

I didn’t leave the ship, but took a few steps out on the ramp, swiveling my head to both sides to ensure all was well. We’d landed a few miles from the settlement where the quarry was hiding out; it wasn’t even a landing platform, just a clearing in the forest. 

A small, unlighted path led to town. It was blissfully dark, as was everything else. The village wasn’t even large enough to send light pollution out this far, and the galaxy stretched out above me in its constant infiniteness. Reassuring, if sometimes terrifying. 

The air was fresh but chilly, and I only lingered for a moment or two before returning to the warmth of the ship. I shut the hatch, double-checking that it was locked, returned the blaster to its spot in the armory, and shut the lights off. 

There weren’t any viewports down here, and the ship got pitch black with lights out. I didn’t mind. I couldn’t sleep with any light anyway, and I’d gotten so used to the ship it was like being surrounded by a warm, dark cocoon. 

Mando had told me to use his bed when he was gone, and I took advantage whenever I could. The alternative was the cold floor. Granted, the worn padding of the bed wasn’t much better. But I felt even safer in the little alcove, and on my first night along I’d discovered that it smelled of him. A reassuringly masculine scent, tinged with sweat and blood from the occasional troublesome nights he’d have. It wasn’t cologne either- I would’ve seen it lying around.

I gave a sudden giggle in the dark of night, thinking about the Mandalorian taking the time to dab on some cologne. It was too ridiculous to fathom. 

With that image on my mind, I drifted off.

I was having a nightmare. I was drowning, couldn’t breathe under the hot layers of water. Hands dragged me down, kept me there. I was about to faint when-

I woke up, and instantly sat up. Or tried to. There was a heavy weight splayed across my chest, and a hand wrapped around my throat. 

In a split second, the adrenaline in my body shot to 100% capacity and I went ballistic. Had I been fighting with my head, I would’ve lost. I’d gotten to feeling too safe in the ship, and the attack had completely blindsided me. And the baby…

I wriggled against the weight, right hand shooting up and realizing that whoever had his hand on my throat wasn’t about to budge. Kriff, he was strong. 

So I blindly grabbed, finding two of his fingers and bending them straight back with as much force as I could muster.

The man shouted, and his alarm gave me the opportunity to get off the bed. Even in the dark, I knew where we were. He was between me and the hatch, and more importantly, he was between me and the ladder. 

Where’s my knife? I groped at my outfit, but I wasn’t outfitted. 

He’d recovered from the finger injury and charged at me, a fact I only ascertained from the heavy steps stampeding across the metal towards me. I got low, on my hands and knees, and he tripped right over me, kicking me hard in the side in the process.

The kick kriffing hurt. He’d woken me up in the middle of the night. And the baby was upstairs. Rage clouded my sight. This creep was going to pay.

It didn’t cross my mind to wonder why the hatch was still up, or how he’d gotten it up in the first place. 

I rose and tackled where I thought he’d be, gratified when I landed on something large and warm and a pained grunt escaped its mouth. It was a few seconds of grasping around to realize where I was- straddling his stomach, right on top of him. His chest was unarmored.

Which probably meant his head was unarmored. I shot a fist out blindly towards where his head would be. 

My knuckles crumpled against metal with a hard clang and a sickening crunch, and I howled in pain. Okay, so he did have a helmet. And I had several broken knuckles. 

He took my pain as an opportunity and stood- just stood up. Right there from the floor, with my legs still wrapped around him. One hand grabbed my ass, and the other my hair, tugging it back painfully. 

He was impossibly strong, lifting me into the air like I weighed nothing, and it pissed me off that he was touching my ass. I bit blindly into the blackness, where I thought his arm holding my hair back would be. 

I made contact on the second try, crunching down and breaking through skin. The taste of blood flooded my mouth, and I smiled around the wound, not letting go.

He made a sound that was more surprise than pain and retaliated by slamming me against the wall, right next to the ladder. 

My head went fuzzy, but I hoped the little guy wouldn’t wake up from all the ruckus. My arms had fallen limp at my sides, but I brought them up again to scratch at his torso, his arms- anywhere I could reach. 

My head was clanging, and I forced myself to deal with the possibility that I may very well lose this fight.

Sensing this, my brain took over from my body. I slumped against the wall, letting all tension out of my muscles. I sagged against the wall, the man’s arms the only thing holding me up. 

It worked. Shocked with my apparent loss of consciousness, he dropped me. Smiling despite myself, I kicked my leg out and caught him square in the knee on the way down. He yelled, in real pain this time, and I fell to the metal floor with a complete lack of grace and a loud, “Umph!”

He’d fallen as well, maybe completely or maybe to one knee, I couldn’t tell. He groped out for me, and I let him, getting the general idea of where he was. He was crouched on one knee, one hand pulling me closer in to him by the ankle.

This was a shot in… well, a shot in the dark, nearly literally. But I wanted this fight over, and I wanted his helmet off. 

Using his own force pulling me into him, I kicked off with my other leg, spinning as I fell towards him, latching my thighs tightly around his neck. He’d dropped my ankle, and clawed at my thighs as if to get them off him. 

They didn’t loosen, even when my back slammed onto the cold metal floor and my head went fuzzy again. This was muscle memory, keeping his head trapped between my thighs. His hands would be a problem in a second, but at the moment they were fighting with both the darkness and my legs. 

I reached down with my non-broken hand, found the edge of his helmet, and began to haul it up towards me. 

“Y/N!” The voice was sharp, a bark in the dark. Shocked by recognition I let the man go, skittering to one end of the cabin as his footsteps disappeared to the other. 

The lights were flicked on, and I shut my eyes against the harsh intrusion. The footsteps returned to stop in front of me, and gradually I became able to see again.

I wished I couldn’t when I looked up to see Mando peering down at me. He was helmeted, but had taken the armor off its lining. It was stacked neatly in a corner. I wrestled with about three million different thoughts in the span of three seconds. There was confusion and fear, but first there was anger, a powerful rage bubbling up deep in me. 

“Why did you attack me?” I asked, doing a decent job of keeping my voice level.

He offered his hand to help me up and again I refused it, picking my bruised and battered body off the cold metal myself. 

His hand fell gracefully back to his side, but I didn’t miss it clenching into a fist for a moment before becoming lax once again. “We need to talk.” His voice was measured, unreadable as always. 

To top things off, the child began to cry upstairs. A deep wail; the type that didn’t disappear until one of us held him. 

I made to ascend the ladder, but Mando put a hand out to stop me. “I’ll get him. Wait outside.”

With that, he turned and went to do as he’d said. That he wouldn’t let me hold the child worried me more than anything else, somehow even more than the fact that he’d attacked me. 

I dropped the ramp, but not before donning my jacket, reassured by the weight of the blade in the pocket. I had no idea what Mando was thinking, and for the first time it was more of an actual danger to me than a simple nuisance. 

It took awhile for Mando to reappear, but when he did I was still standing ramrod straight a few yards from the ship.

“Is he okay?” I asked despite myself.

“He’s back to sleep.” He descended the ramp and stood a few steps away from me. 

For the first time, I had to actively repress the urge to fill the silence between us. I doubted ditzy faking would get me through this.

And my hand really kriffing hurt. My ribs ached where I’d been kicked, and my back ached from being slammed around. I had a killer headache. I wouldn’t have been able to play stupid if I’d wanted. 

Mando spoke first. “Who are you?” His voice betrayed him; a mix of anger and mistrust lurked beneath the words.

“I never lied to you, Mando,” I began. “But I don’t want to-“

He interrupted, but his voice didn’t raise or waver at all. Deadly calm. “And I don’t want to have to kill you. I’m not especially convinced I could, after that performance you gave. And the fact that you now have a knife. But I’ll do my damned best if it comes to it. Who do you work for?”

I gulped at that. I was especially convinced that Mando could kill me if he wanted to, and without much effort on his part. Now that all his accoutrements were on the table. 

This question I could answer with ease. “I don’t work for anyone but you.”

He waited so long it became painful for the both of us, but I didn’t elaborate, and he spoke again. “Where did you learn to fight like that? You fight like-“ He cut himself off at the last moment, but the weight of what he’d clearly been about to say weighed heavily over the both of us.

I fought like a Mandalorian. A cornered, unarmed, scared Mandalorian this time, but a Mandalorian nonetheless. I suddenly realized part of why he was so upset about it. If he thought I was Mandalorian, he would think I’d left the Way. 

“I’m not Mandalorian,” I reassured him, sucking in a deep breath then releasing it. I opened my mouth to elaborate, but thought better of it.

There was another long pause. “Who, then?” he prompted. “Who taught you to fight? Private security? Crime family? Imperial military?”

I cringed as the options got worse and worse. He fell silent, and I bounced back and forth between my two feet. He wasn’t going to let this go; I suspected if I didn’t confess my true heritage, and soon, I wouldn’t be walking away from here. 

“Are you an Imperial sympathizer?” The question tore from my mouth with only half permission from my brain.

He went shock straight at that. There was a small noise from his helmet that I’d only heard on four occasions previously. The fabric over his chest moved in and out.

He was laughing. 

“Are you?” I demanded, voice stronger this time with the injustice of it all.

He shut up immediately, shoulders showing a bit more relaxation. “No, I’m not. I take jobs for whoever can afford to hire me.”

I watched him for signs of deception and saw none. I couldn’t see him sympathizing with the Empire, and even if he did he wasn’t the type of man to disguise such a thing. He wasn’t scared of anything, or anybody.

“Can you keep a secret for me?”

He tilted his helmet forward once in agreement.

I thought that was weak as far as promises went, but I pushed on. “I never lied to you. But I made myself ditzy so you wouldn’t ask more. Y/N is my real name. Tano is my last name.”

I could see the gears turning in his head. That name sounded familiar, but he couldn’t figure out why. 

“I assume you know about Jango Fett?”

He nodded.

“And the Republic’s clone army, all equal reproductions of him?”

Again, he nodded. 

“I’m the daughter of one of them. My father was traveling through my mother’s system early on in the Clone War. By the time she realized she was pregnant, he was long gone. She dumped me in an orphanage and I never heard from either of them again.”

He’d gone stiff again. “After the Empire took over, some clones went awol. Only a handful. One of them, Rex, had been a commander in the GAR. He joined the Rebellion, and on a mission to my home city he realized what I was and took me with him; taught me everything he knew.”

I chuckled, remembering how I’d screamed and begged me to take him with me. I’d been ten; the orphanage was getting old. 

“I took the last name of Rex’s Jedi general, who lived to fight with the Rebellion, and I was indoctrinated from childhood. I grew up to work in their dark ops division.”

It was the first thing he reacted to. “They don’t have a great reputation.”

“It didn’t matter. The ends justified the means. I killed…” I waved it off, thinking better of it and giving him a lame smile. “You see why I can’t be around Imperial sympathizers.”

“Yes. You should’ve told me.”

“Would you hire me if you’d known I was such a liability?” I bit back.

He was quiet then.

I shrugged. “Can’t blame you. I wouldn’t have either. Anyway, after the fall of the Empire I was jobless. There aren’t many skills that translate from assassin to senator.”

“But from assassin to bounty hunter…” he concluded.

I nodded, pleased. “Exactly. Only, I couldn’t reveal my past for my own safety, and without any experience or connections, the Guild is pretty tough to break into.”

“That’s when you found me,” I finished up. “Waiting tables at that grimy cantina. I also wasn’t lying when I said I needed this job.”

“What happened to your father?”

“He got early retirement. I couldn’t stick around and burden him. He thinks I’m an office worker on Rodia,” I blurted out, instantly blushing and regretting it. I hadn’t meant to reveal that much, but Force it felt good to talk about this. 

“Your little playact did little to convince me. I knew you were hiding something. It’s part of the reason I jumped you tonight.”

Oh. That. I’d nearly forgotten about it, so lost in the tension between us and telling my story. “Part of?” I prompted.

“I told you time would tell.”

My mind sifted through that, and I frowned as I realized what he was saying. “You attacked me just to prove to me that I needed more training?”

“At first, yes. When you reacted like you did, I decided to see how far I could take it. How much you knew.”

“You took off the armor so I wouldn’t know it was you,” I realized.

“And to keep you from seriously injuring yourself.”

“You should’ve taken your helmet off if you didn’t want me to injure myself,” I said, half joke but half serious reprimand as I looked down at my mauled right hand. My fingers looked like all the insides had been taken out, run through a meat grinder, then hastily placed back inside. 

“C’mere. I’ll patch us both up.” He dipped his helmet towards the ship, and I followed him back inside, wondering at myself all the while. I should’ve been furious. But he’d had good reason for what he did. Plus, my hand desperately needed first aid.

I sat on the mussed bed as he grabbed the kit and set it next to me. I shivered despite myself, grateful for the bright light and the firmly shut hatch. 

His arms reached around both my sides, hardly leaving a second for my breathing to quicken before they pulled back, draping a blanket over my shoulders.

“Thanks.”

“I don’t want you getting shock,” he answered gruffly, if too quickly.

I thought back to the events of the night. “What if I’d had a knife?”

He tapped his helmet. “Night vision. I’d have stopped you immediately.”

Duh. I watched his arms work, freezing in place when I spotted the bite on his arm. I’d gone clear through the fabric of both shirts and into the skin, and dried blood crusted around. 

“I bit you,” I said stupidly.

“Yes, you did.”

“You should clean that out. Bite wounds get nasty.”

“I know.”

I thought it best to not ask him how he knew, and he tackled my hand first, setting the fingers. It hurt, but I replayed the events of the night in my mind and managed to keep my breathing steady. 

He spoke again. “That’s desperate fighting, biting someone. I think you would’ve killed me.”

“I would’ve tried. Before I left for missions Rex used to always say, ‘Today is a good day for someone else to die.’”

Mando froze at that. Before I could ask him what was wrong, he drew the blade I’d been practicing with earlier and undid the leather. He handed over the bare knife, and I was reminded of the   
inscription. 

“Your dad’s expression. It’s an old Mandalorian saying.” He dipped his head toward the inscription on the knife, and I got the idea, even as I squinted at the unfamiliar words.

“Huh. Quite the coincidence.”

“No.” His response was too sharp, too quick. He softened it by adding, “It’s common amongst my people.”

We were quiet for a few more moments, then he spoke again. “You’re alright. You take care of the kid; you keep the ship clean. I’ll keep you on if you want.”

I nodded instantly. “I do. But can I ask you something?”

He dipped his helmet in assent.

“Why do you trust me? For all you know I’m lying to you.”

“Are you?”

“No.”

He was quiet for a few seconds, continuing his work on my fingers. “You’re a good liar. But not that good.”

“You have a lot of faith in your ability to tell what’s a lie.”

“Yes. I’m also going to contact a few acquaintances. Rebellion fighters. See if they can confirm your story.”

Should that make me mad? I mulled it over for nearly a minute, and decided no. I had nothing to hide anymore. I was telling the truth.

“Fine by me. In exchange for my truth, would you consider telling me some of yours?” I made sure to emphasize the joking tone in my voice. He never would.

He finished up my hand and looked at me, thinking. He’d been silent for so long that I was about to leave when he spoke up.

“Only time will tell.”

**Author's Note:**

> I read over this once after writing but I'm v tired and inattentive… plz let me know if u catch anything... plz let me know if you're looking to beta star wars one shots...


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